How a quaint
Virginia university gave rise to one of the best players in women’s lacrosse history
FARMVILLE’S
BY MARK MACYK FINEST
It was the late 1970s, and Google was still a few decades from being invented. Julie Dayton pulled out the Women’s Sports Foundation’s “College Athletic Scholarship Guide,” grabbed a pen and paper, and went to work.
Back then, girls from Laurel High in southern Delaware didn’t really go to college to play sports. Actually, it was rare then for anyone from Laurel to go to college for anything. Of the 100 or so students Dayton graduated with, she estimated, maybe 25 went on to some sort of college. But Dayton’s basketball coach said she was good enough play sports in college. So Dayton, who played field hockey, basketball and softball, started handwriting letters to the names she found in the scholarship guide. The letters went up and down the East Coast, and out to the Midwest. A few came back as undeliverable. One letter made its way to Farmville, Va., where it ended up in the hands of the woman who would became Dayton’s first lacrosse coach. Which is funny, because Dayton didn’t really know what lacrosse was at the time.
Longwood University had one of the best field hockey programs in
16 LACROSSE MAGAZINE » September/october 2016
the country. It’s the reason Dayton ended up in Farmville. In the second semester of her freshman year, she picked up a lacrosse stick for the first time. Many of her
teammates did the same. They didn’t really have a choice. Longwood’s field hockey coach, Dee McDonough, also was the Lancers’ lacrosse coach. Longwood is a small school. Recruits weren’t exactly banging down the door. So McDonough did the next best thing and recruited her field hockey players.
That bit of ingenuity set in motion one legendary, if unexpected lacrosse career. Dayton scored 93 goals as a two-time All-American for the Lancers, spent nine years on the U.S. national team, and now has a spot in the National Lacrosse Hall of Fame — the first player from Longwood to join the pantheon of lacrosse greats. It was a difficult destination to envision that first winter in Longwood’s gym. Dayton liked how fast lacrosse was, and how the game lent itself to creativity. But despite her coach’s insistence, she didn’t see the point of cradling. It just slowed her down.
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